Churchill-Syria Analogies: A “Syrious” Situation

Every­one pre­tends not to be knee-deep in the icky, tricky, sticky Syr­ia sit­u­a­tion. You might say Wash­ing­ton is in a Semi-Syri­ous mode right now. And a Semi-Not-So-Syri­ous mode. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. Because this whole affair is rid­dled with enig­mas and mys­ter­ies enough to make Win­ston Churchill spin his conun­drums right off. And rumor has it, he har­bored huge conun­drums.

He has that right. I don’t know if Will Durst is a Churchillian, but he cer­tain­ly has Churchill’s knack for coin­ing words. “Syri­ous” ranks with Churchill’s “pur­blind worldlings”—the kind of peo­ple he often wished to “destrigu­late.” A lot of them are in Wash­ing­ton.

Wash­ing­ton Post colum­nist and grad­u­ate Churchillian Charles Krautham­mer appeared Sep­tem­ber 6th on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. Hewitt com­pared the present-day Unit­ed States to the one Churchill spoke of in 1943 at Har­vard (“the price of great­ness is respon­si­bil­i­ty”). Atti­tudes about America’s role in the world are far dif­fer­ent today than Churchill had espoused back then, Hewitt said.

Krautham­mer cau­tioned against com­par­ing World War II to Syr­ia:

There is a dif­fer­ence of scale….That was an exis­ten­tial strug­gle where the future of civ­i­liza­tion was sure­ly in the bal­ance. It could be that Syr­ia will devel­op into a World War I-like world con­flict, but that is fair­ly unlike­ly right now. It is not a con­flict in which the exis­tence of ways of life is at stake.

Read the link if you need to know what Krautham­mer would do. As to what Churchill would do….please.

I will, how­ev­er, offer a piece of Churchillian advice from 1946, which may be applic­a­ble. He was talk­ing about the Rus­sians, but it applies as well to Iran, Syr­ia and that ilk:

From what I have seen of our Russ­ian friends and Allies dur­ing the war, I am con­vinced that there is noth­ing they admire so much as strength, and there is noth­ing for which they have less respect than weak­ness, espe­cial­ly mil­i­tary weakness….You can only deal with them on the fol­low­ing basis…by hav­ing supe­ri­or force on your side on the mat­ter in question—and they must also be con­vinced that you will use—you will not hes­i­tate to use—those forces, if nec­es­sary, in the most ruth­less man­ner….